The Kongamato

The Kongamato

From: http://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/siren/552/af_konga.html

The natives of the Jiundu
region of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) have legends of a strange
flying creature called kongamato. The name means "overwhelmer
of boats" and appears in a magic charm of the Kaonde tribe.
The charm, muchi wa kongamato, is a recipe for a type of potion
reputed to protect travellers from floods, which are caused by
the monster.

Frank H. Melland was intrigued by this charm and asked several
natives what sort of animal the Kongamato was, and their answer
was "a lizard with wings like a bat." Melland gathered
that the wingspan of the animal was between four and seven feet,
and that it was red, featherless, and toothed. The natives identified
it with a pterodactyl when a picture was shown to them by Melland.
As to its whereabouts, a tribal chief from the Jiundu region said
that it dwelt in the Jiundu Swamps. Melland wrote of the Kongamato
in In Witchbound Africa (1923).

Professor C. Wiman of Uppsala University suggested that the natives'
description was influenced by German excavations of pterosaur bones
in eastern Africa. However, this did not discourage Kongamato reports:
in 1925, British newspaperman G. Ward Price and no less a personage
than the future Duke of Windsor were in Southern Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe). Here, they learned a local man had been attacked by
one of the flying monsters in a swamp. Once again, the natives
identified the creature as a pterosaur.

A. Blayney Percival recounted in 1928 how he found a set of odd
tracks--tracks which the Kitui Wakama natives assured him were
left by a nocturnal creature which flew down from Mt. Kenya. Capt.
Charles Pitman recounted in 1942 that there were stories of a flying
monster which dwelt in swamps on the borders of Angola and Zaire.

In 1956, the first real sighting took place when J.P.F. Brown
encountered two flying creatures with a three-foot wingspan, long
tail, and dog-like muzzle on a road near L. Bangweulu, Zambia.
They doubled back and flew overhead once more, and then Brown saw
their sharp fang-like teeth.

Finally, Roy P. Mackal launched an expedition to Namibia to search
for the Kongamato in 1988. Mackal didn't see the fabled flying
beast, but James Kosi (one of Mackal's group) claimed to have seen
a large black gliding form with white markings--maybe or maybe
not the Kongamato.

Other accounts of flying creatures that aren't Kongamato, but
are nonetheless interesting in that context, exist. In 1932, author
Ivan T. Sanderson was leading an expedition in the Assumbo Mountains
of Cameroon. When crossing a river, Sanderson recalled, a flying
creature nearly the size of an eagle dove at him. He said that
that evening, the expedition saw the black, sharp-toothed animal
again. Natives called the animal olitiau. Sanderson himself believed
it was an exceptionally large specimen of the hammerhead bat (Hypsignathus
monstrosus), a particularly repulsive type of fruit bat. However,
he also noted in 1970 that the dentition of the animal, from what
he noticed, seemed more reptilian than mammalian (Bernard Heuvelmans
disputes this notion).

Heuvelmans believed that the Olitiau was actually a large, unknown,
type of bat related to the hammerhead, its common name derived
from the term ole ntya ("the forked one," the Christian
devil). Other cryptozoologists suggest the creature may be a surviving
pterosaur.

Another account with possible relevance to these flying creatures
is recorded in Old Fourlegs by J.L.B. Smith, an account of the
discovery of the coelacanth. Smith recounted a superstition, circulating
near Mount Kilimanjaro, of flying dragons. Roy P. Mackal inquired
to Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, another of the coelacanth's discoverers,
who had done an investigation into the dragons.

Courtenay-Latimer told Mackal that she had investigated a report
from Keetmanshoop, Namibia. A boy tending his father's sheep became
aware of the sound of rushing wind. He looked up to see a large
serpent hurling itself off a ridge. The boy was knocked unconscious
(presumably because of fright) and recounted later that the creature
gave off a smell reminiscent of burnt brass when it landed.

Courtenay-Latimer came to the conclusion that the animal could
not be identified, although she suggested it may have been an injured
python. However, Mackal points out that the python explanation
does not explain the disturbance in the air at the time the snake
appeared.

In the same book, Smith also recounts how he learned, in a letter,
that similar winged dragons were occasionally seen by a German
missionary family near Mt. Meru. Bernard Heuvelmans contacted a
friend of the German missionaries (the Trappes), Dr. Laszlo Saska.
Dr. Saska corroborated that a winged creature, which he (perhaps
inappropriately) termed a "Pterosaurian," was seen in
the forests near the Trappe homestead.

Heuvelmans also recounts the story of Earl Denham, an explorer
and mountaineer. Writing in his 1957 book Animal Africa, Denham
recounts an experience he had in the Ruwenzori (a region between
Zaire and Uganda).

I turned my back on the peaks, and...I heard a sharp rushing sound...I
looked up and was amazed to see the vague outlines of two unidentifiable
birds as they hurtled into the mists below, diving almost vertically...